Postage meters have significantly evolved over the past twenty years with the migration from mechanical meters to electronic meters to personal computer and internet based postage metering products. As part of this evolution, certain postage meter products now make use of general-purpose printers for printing an indication of postage value (postage indicium) dispensed by the postage metering system. These general purpose printers do not handle envelopes very well and a number of printer failure modes may occur that result in either no indicium, an incomplete indicium, or an unreadable indicium being produced by the printer (for purposes of this application all three invalid indicium conditions are collectively referred to as misprints). When a misprint occurs, the postage metering system has already accounted for the postage value within its accounting registers, but the customer does not have a viable mailpiece with a postage indicium that is acceptable by the postal authority. Accordingly, a new mailpiece with a valid postage indicium must be produced and the customer charged a second time. The customer's only recourse to recover the lost funds associated with the misprint is to bring the mailpiece with the misprint to the postal authority for a refund. Naturally, where the printer failed to print anything, the customer would have no ability to collect a refund at all.
Pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/575,110, filed Dec. 19, 1995 and which is hereby incorporated by reference, attempts to overcome the above problem by permitting the customer to reprint individual cryptographically secure indicium in the eve nt of a misprint condition. Furthermore, the aforementioned application allows this reissue to occur without accounting for the reissued indicium within the meter accounting system module. Unfortunately, postal authorities have been reluctant to authorize the reissue feature described in the aforementioned application because it does not provide a way to distinguish an original indicium from a reissued indicium. The postal authorities are fearful that an unscrupulous customer might attempt to print multiple reissued indicium as a way of defrauding the postal authority out of the postage revenue that it is entitled to. That is, the original indicium and the reissued indicium would both enter the mailstream while only the original indicium was properly account ed for within the postage metering system.